Millimeter-wave (MMW) electromagnetic radiation corresponds to the extremely-high frequency (EHF), which is designated for the 30 to 300 GHz band of the radio-frequency (RF) spectrum. The radio waves in this band suffer high atmospheric attenuation due to absorption by the atmospheric gasses, and their application is limited to terrestrial communication in the kilometer range.
Due to high losses of millimeter-wave signals in interconnects, millimeter-wave front-end blocks have to be placed in close proximity to the millimeter-wave antennas to limit impact on transmitter output power and receiver noise figure. Existing solutions transmit modulated signals at intermediate frequency (IF) that could potentially have severe bandwidth limitation due to large fractional bandwidth, especially for high throughput applications using channel bonding. The existing technology does not allow the use of direct conversion radio architecture, which leads to larger die area and requires noise-sensitive local oscillator (LO) signal generation and/or multiplication in a front-end chip. This can complicate implementation of both the chip and the interface architecture.